Wednesday, August 19, 2009

Played Lately: Champions Online

I never liked City of Heroes. Because I started playing with the Guild Wars/World of Warcraft generation of MMOs, I was already used to games that were reacting to Everquest instead of emulating it. Since CoH was firmly in the EQ generation, it felt archaic whenever I tried it. In total, I don't think I spent more than twelve to fifteen hours in Paragon City.

Why go into all that? Mostly so you understand how shocked I am that I'm enjoying Champions Online this much. Patcher woes behind us, day two was a much better experience.

Here's my first character, Arcfire. She's flame caster modeled after my character from the Champions game I played in back in high school. (Was that 18 years ago? Oh my.) All I need is a massive AoE stun (i.e. a Presence attack in the original game) and she'll be just right. I was happy to find this image in my screenshots folder, evidently saved when I hit the save option on the character creation screen. How cool is that?

I had a little trouble getting into the game for the first fifteen or twenty minutes. I only played the tutorial a little bit before shutting it down. After some reflection, I attribute that to my difficulty learning the controls. There are enough things different that I didn't grok it until my second play session. Which lasted until 2 AM. And the only reason I stopped is because I didn't want to sleep through my alarm in the morning.

I played through the entirety of the Tutorial zone as well as the Desert crisis zone. At the end of the crisis zone, I teamed up with another flame caster with the moniker of Satan to take down a group quest as well as complete the final instance. His costume was quite impressive by my standards. (I'm just not that good with the character creator, either in this game or CoH.) Think of the devil by way of KISS with a golden halo on top.

We talked about what we thought of the game since neither of us played in closed beta. He was enjoying it, but he missed the massive part of the MMO. When I remarked that it reminded me of Guild Wars that way, he said that's why he quit. I don't mind this kind of instancing because I'm sympathetic to what the developers are trying to accomplish. I like the focused storytelling and I like they can change world conditions to fit. The image above is Arcfire hovering over the statue of Grond that had been demolished during the crisis, but rebuilt in the current story. I love that stuff.

Here we have a Powerhouse trainer telling my fledgling heroine exactly how bad of a superhero she is. Okay not really. But have you seen the list of available emotes in this game? I'm insanely jealous of Tipa's screenshot comics, so I had to play around a little bit. Not that I will produce anything worth reading, but this does fire the imagination.

Back to the game tonight for day three. If you want to look me up, I'm Arcfire@AnjinM. Time to beat on some more bad guys.